I fell short
by kylermalloy
Summary: Lydia goes to see a disoriented and frightened Stiles in the hospital. Missing scene from 3x18.


**(This started out as a fluffy h/c piece with just the bare minimum of angst...but somehow we ended up here.)**

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He lay motionless in the hospital bed.

Lydia watched him through the tiny window on his door. _He looks smaller than normal,_ she thought.

She tried to catch the motion of his chest, that small movement that would've assured her of his continued life.

She tried to find some way to reassure herself that Stiles was, in fact, all right.

But she was too far away. His breaths were imperceptible, even to her sharp eye.

Melissa had told her and Scott to go home, to not worry about Stiles. He was in good hands, and he would be fine with some rest.

Lydia believed her.

But she couldn't quell the dread clawing in her throat, the dark space inside her swallowing her confidence. Doubt and uncertainty nagged at her even now, pulling her down toward an ocean of guilt.

 _I was so sure._

It would have been her fault.

Bodies, other bodies, flashed unbidden through her brain. Covered in blood and strewn lifelessly out for her, the banshee, to find. Throats cut. Heads caved in. Dead eyes staring, pleading, accusing...

That could have been Stiles. _Stiles._

If inexplicable genius hadn't struck another, if finding Stiles had been left to Lydia alone, he might have died tonight.

The thought jolted through her like lightning, shooting icy spikes into her veins. The thought of him lying downstairs in a freezer, an altogether different kind of hospital bed, chilled her to the bone.

Suddenly she was unable to bear the distance between them, this door blocking her from him, and so she reached forward and turned the handle. Slipped in the room. Closed the door quietly behind her.

Stiles's room was unnervingly quiet. Almost like it had been sound-proofed. Except for the _blips_ of the heart monitor, the only sound in the room was a low, neutral buzz. Lydia felt as though she had stepped into some alternate plane, some pocket universe where it was just her and Stiles.

Well, this version of Stiles. His unconscious body. Up close he looked...fragile. Pale. Wan. Sick, almost. His lips were white, bloodless. Gray rimmed his eyes.

Lydia approached him with slow, hesitant steps. Not out of reluctance to get near him—no, she'd never wanted to run to someone so badly. But with every step she took he looked worse for wear. Less like himself. It unsettled her.

She almost regretted coming in.

Out in the hall, watching him through a window, Lydia could imagine that he had simply spent another week without sleep, and his father had finally had him hospitalized and sedated so he could get some proper rest.

But seeing up close how he had suffered tonight, exposed to the elements with no one able to find him, just sank Lydia deeper into her pool of guilt.

 _She_ had done this to him. Lydia had done this, with her mysterious, untrustworthy powers that she'd had such faith in. Such stupid, foolish faith.

By trusting herself, she had almost lost Stiles.

The chair beside his bed was an ugly pale shade of pink. The cushion was not nearly soft enough, she noted as she sat down next to him. Stared into his empty face.

His words echoed in her mind. _Don't start doubting yourself now._

Look where that had gotten her.

"I hate you." The words came out louder than she anticipated, making her jump in the quiet space.

"You told me you believed in me. Now look at where we are. I trusted myself; I listened to those dumb, _stupid_ voices in my head, and they _lied_ to me.

"This is your fault." It felt good to spit the accusations, even if no one else could hear them. To alleviate even the smallest bit of self-loathing eating away at her insides.

"This is _your_ _fault,_ Stiles. Why did you have to tell me that? Why—" The next words caught in her throat. _Why are you here, in the hospital. Why are you always giving me what I don't deserve. Why do you love me._

 _Why do I..._

She could feel tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, and she blinked them back with a fierce determination.

Her phone buzzed at her side. She didn't bother to even check who the message was from. Scott, Allison, Aiden, her mom, it didn't really matter.

Lydia leaned forward, placing one hand on the mattress. So close to Stiles's fingers she could feel their warmth. But not close enough to touch. The last time their hands touched, entrancing her, locking her in that moment, was when those fated words were spoken. _Don't start doubting yourself now._ She didn't want to think about that anymore.

"Stiles." Her voice was less than a whisper, less than a breath. So soft that it was almost drowned by the buzz still permeating the room. It was a whimper, a tiny, tenuous plea. For him to open his eyes, to run his hands through his messy hair and prepare to figure everything out.

Her pinky finger raised up. Brushed the side of his hand, which made hers look like a child's in comparison.

No electricity. No mesmerizing sensation. His hand was barely warm enough to signify that this was, in fact, a living person. She felt...nothing.

But apparently he did.

At her touch his body came to life all at once, reacting with what could only be described as a convulsion.

She jerked her hand back, startled, before vaulting out of the chair, getting closer to his bed. "Stiles. Stiles." She spoke his name with an awed reverence. He was _awake._

He reacted sluggishly, turning his head first left, away from her, then to the right. His eyes slid right past her, not focusing, not seeing. "Who...what—what's going—"

"It's me."

He scrunched his eyes, trying to see, to distinguish the voice talking to him.

"It's _Lydia,_ Stiles."

"Lydia," he echoed, repeating after her like a prayer. "Where am I? Where are you? I can't..." His eyes darted from side to side with increasing speed as he became more and more anxious.

Couldn't he see? Was he still dreaming, still trapped inside his head?

His helplessness twisted her stomach into a knot. Why did his pain hurt _her_ so much?

She reached one hand out—pretending not to notice its trembling—and laid her fingers on top of his. No hesitation this time, not if it was what Stiles needed.

"You're in the hospital. They found you outside, Stiles. You were having a nightmare—you called Scott, do you remember that?" The call that had somehow made its way into the radio waves of her brain.

His hand flipped palm up to grasp hers. The movement seemed instinctive—he stared unseeing into a corner. "I...I...I was cold. The floor was cold. There was something...my leg..." He tightened his grip on her hand, still staring past her with a blank look of dread.

Something he'd said nagged at her, pulled like a loose thread caught on a nail. What was it?

"Your leg is fine," she reassured him. This, at least, was something she did not have to feel guilty about. "You weren't hurt. Just cold."

Then it snapped into place. _The floor was cold,_ he'd whispered. The _floor._

His behemoth hand swallowed hers whole. Her fingers twitched nervously inside his grasp. "Stiles, you were outside, in that coyote den. You know that, don't you? You weren't...you weren't in a room with a floor. That's what you told Scott, but you were...dreaming."

He'd been dreaming, and the voices in her head had described his _dream_ to her. She'd led them to a basement, a cold room with no wounded boy inside.

But he was awake now. And still spoke of a floor. A room.

His breathing began to speed up again. "My leg...he...he made me think...it was hurt. Then it was my other leg."

He wasn't making sense. "Who's 'he'?"

Stiles shifted uncomfortably in his bed, as if there were something crawling down his spine. He turned his head and met Lydia's eyes for the first time. It struck her again, harder this time, how worn down he looked—the gray bags under his sunken eyes, the bloodshot whites. "There was someone in the room. He...he didn't have a face."

His voice was unlike Lydia had ever heard it. A high-pitched whimper, almost a keening, as he described what he'd seen. Whatever it was, vision, dream, imagination...it had terrified him.

She laid her free hand on top of their entwined ones. "Stiles, that was a dream. You sleepwalked outside and got stuck in the coyote den. That's real. Everything else was just a dream." Her thumb stroked the back of his hand in what she hoped was a soothing pattern.

This couldn't be helping. Lydia was acutely aware of how stiff, how logical she sounded, how...uncomforting.

Stiles always knew what to say to her. At least in the moments where it counted. He knew how to snap her out of her funk with just the right amounts of kindness and truth and Stiles-ness. _I think you look beautiful. Don't start doubting yourself now. Then scream. Lydia, scream._

He shook his head, his face screwing up pitifully. Like he was about to cry. "I don't know, I don't _know,_ " he whined, his voice breaking on the last word. "I don't know what's real."

He was a child, a lost, broken child making plaintive pleas to an unwilling universe, and all Lydia could do was hold his hand.

"What—what if you're not..." He studied her face with a growing horror—yet there was a disconnect, as if he wasn't really seeing her at all. "Lydia, are you real?"

Lydia felt her stomach drop. This wasn't a bad dream Stiles had had. Nor could it be remedied with some medication and a good night's sleep. There was something _wrong_ with him.

Her voice quivered, hers now nearing a breaking point as well. "I'm real, Stiles. I'm right here." Her hand moved without conscious permission, reaching toward his face. Reaching to stroke his cheek like she had once—

He tore his hand free from her grasp. He knocked her palm away, eyes filled with terror. "Get _away!_ "

He shrank into his bed, attempting to widen the distance between them. His panicky breaths were nearing hysteria. The heart monitor still recording his pulse beeped rapidly, almost a constant drone.

Lydia's mouth opened hollowly as she searched for words, any words that could help.

But even if she could find them, how could he understand them? If he couldn't even see her face.

"Stiles..."

He held out one shaking finger in a feeble imitation of resolve. "Stay away from me."

G*d, this hurt. Lydia was no stranger to vicious words, but to hear them from Stiles. _Stiles,_ who'd breathed again at the taste of her lips. He once trusted her enough to hold him underwater in a freezing tub of ice. And just days ago he'd played casually with her fingers and told her not to doubt herself.

 _Stay away from me._

Lydia swallowed the lump in her throat. This wasn't about her. This was about Stiles. Stiles needed her help right now.

Her hands felt cold as she reached out once more. Cold like ice. Numb. Like freezing water. Pulling her hands out of a freezing cold tub. Staring at Stiles's face, submerged under a layer of ice. Peaceful. Pained. Drowned.

He was still drowning, she thought, as she touched his cheeks and he gasped wildly for air, for safety, for clarity.

"Stiles. Shh, shh. Stiles, look at me."

Her thumbs moved up and down across his cheekbones. Stroked his skin, clammy with sweat.

Sense memory threw her backward in time with a suddenness almost like violence. Threw her into a sun-filled locker room, where the same boy hyperventilated under her touch. Where instinct had seized her, and she'd frozen time with her lips.

It had felt so inexplicably _right._

Not this time.

Although the same instinct screamed at her now, there was an ominous tightening in her chest—some deep, primordial part of her warned against it. Warned against _him._

The two warring desires— _bring him back—RUN_ —clanged around in her head while she sat helpless, holding his face in her hands and willing him to come to himself.

"I'm real. This is real. Stiles, it's me. It's okay."

 _No it's not._

Nearly thirty seconds passed before he began to calm. The heart monitor slowed, his breathing tempered, and his soft whimpers quieted as he blinked rapidly. Then recognition flooded his face.

"...Lydia?"

She wanted to sob with relief. "Yes, Stiles, it's me."

His hand snaked upward and closed around her wrist. Something to ground himself to. "I...didn't know. I couldn't tell."

"I know. It's okay." Platitude. Platitude. Like the kind you give to a boy who's dying, bleeding out from claws in his stomach. Then he survives and knows you lied.

This was a much kinder lie. _It's okay._ But Lydia hated it still. The sheer emptiness of the words. Even though they were the only ones she could give him.

Stiles searched her face with a heart-shattering vulnerability. "I don't—I don't know what's wrong with me."

"It's okay. It's okay. You'll be fine. They'll—they'll take care of you here. They'll figure it out."

Those words. They clanged around in her skull, an edict she'd given Stiles not long ago. _Figure. It. Out._

Back then he couldn't read. Now he couldn't _see._ Now he couldn't distinguish Lydia from the faceless thing in his nightmares.

It was Lydia's turn. Was that what the voices were telling her? Was that why she kept hearing metal on metal in her head? The banshee inside banging pots and pans together, screaming _figure it out figure it out figure it out._

 _I don't know how!_ she screamed back. Her powers hadn't come with an instruction manual. Tonight, for instance, she'd led her friends and Stiles's dad to Eichen House while Stiles was slowly freezing in the woods.

She couldn't do this.

Lydia Martin could do many things, but this was not one of them. She couldn't be responsible for saving Stiles.

More importantly, she couldn't handle _failing_ to save Stiles. Not now. Not after everything.

Not after it had been her hands that had drowned him in an icy bath. Not after he'd gently caressed her fingers, tangled up in string that blared _unsolved, unsolved._

Not since she'd begun to acknowledge the twist he caused in her stomach.

She couldn't lose him. But if his life rested in her hands, she would.

All she seemed to do was fail.

And if she thought about it any more, she was going to be sick.

"I have to go," she announced abruptly. She dropped her hand from his face, slipping it from his grasp.

She'd come to see him to assuage her fears, to ease her guilt, to soothe the voices.

But instead, Stiles had scared her. Her failure burned hotter still. And the clanging in her head was reaching a volume that caused actual, physical pain.

"Lydia." He said her name quietly, a half-mumbled prayer to a deity he wasn't sure could hear him. "Can you stay? Please."

A better person would have stayed.

A stronger person would have done right by him tonight. Would have found him. Saved him.

"I have school in the morning." She began to back away from his bedside, with tiny steps that grew bigger and bigger.

He could see now. He could watch her walk away. "Please don't leave." His voice was thick with tears.

That was when she turned her back to him.

 _I'm sorry._

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 **Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear what you thought in a review!**


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